David Chalmers, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Virtual realism is the metaphysical thesis that virtual entities are real entities. Virtual objects are real digital objects — patterns of bits, computational states, structured information — not illusions or hallucinations.1 Virtual events are real digital events; virtual lives are real digital lives. Virtual realism is a four-fold thesis: virtual entities (1) exist, (2) are causal, (3) are non-illusory, and (4) are perception- independent in the relevant sense.
The thesis is the negation of the fictionalist view (virtual objects are mere fictions) and of the illusionist view (virtual experiences are illusions of reality).23 It is compatible with — and in some ways supported by — Nick Bostrom's simulation argument, but the philosophical thesis is independent: even on the standard view that we live in a non-simulated physical universe, virtual reality experienced as virtual is itself a domain of real digital entities.
A consequence: the simulation hypothesis — the claim that our world is itself a computer simulation — is not a skeptical scenario in the Cartesian sense. If our world is a simulation, the ordinary objects in it are still real (real digital objects); the ordinary events are still real (real digital events); my knowledge of these objects and events is not undermined.4
The simulation hypothesis is a hypothesis about the underlying nature of our reality, not about whether our reality is illusory.
For this chapter, on virtual reality, the focus is on perception. I'll understand illusions as cases in which the world is not as we perceive it to be. The philosophers' distinction between illusion and hallucination is a useful one. There are two different questions we can ask about VR. Is VR a hallucination? That is, do the objects we perceive in VR really exist?Reality Plus, pp. 209–210
Heim used the label primarily for a broad social and political view of virtual reality, intermediate between that of "network idealists who promote virtual communities" and "naive realists who blame electronic culture" for various social ills.Reality Plus, pp. 115–116
Virtual realism and virtual fictionalism How real is virtual reality? As I suggested in chapter 6, we can get a better grip on this question by asking whether what's inside virtual reality—that is, virtual objects—are real. In addition to introducing the expression "virtual world," Susanne Langer also introduced the term "virtual object" into the philosophy of art.Reality Plus, pp. 196–197
Perhaps these points capture some part of what people mean when they say that virtual objects are not real. Still, these criteria seem marginal as criteria for reality. Dolly the cloned lamb is not original (she's a clone of another lamb) and not fundamental (she's made out of particles)—but she is perfectly real.Reality Plus, pp. 125–126
Virtual realism developed across "The Matrix as Metaphysics" (2005), "The Virtual and the Real" (2017), and the full book-length Reality+ (Norton 2022). The thesis is contested by both technological-illusionist views (VR as immersive illusion) and by the Cartesian skeptical tradition (the simulation hypothesis as threatening ordinary knowledge). Madary and Metzinger (2016) raised ethical concerns about VR that engage adjacent terrain; Dreyfus argued against virtuality as genuine engagement. The position is more recent and less contested in the technical-philosophy literature than the hard-problem positions, but is increasingly important given the rise of VR, AR, and the wider AI context.